Every forum of every type on this site has the same things: posts that support the game, posts that hate on the game, and posts that many times offer thoughtful or constructive ideas for improving the game. The one thing that is consistently absent on the forums is Arenanet. Official responses or really any feedback of any sort is so few and far between it begs the question: WHERE IS ARENANET???? 99% of the time a post with the Anet tag is simply a mod shutting down or moving a thread. When players come together to offer serious suggestions for improving the game – Arenanet ignores them. When players offer legitimate complaints about seriously broken aspects of the game – silence.

Arenanet, I am asking you to start communicating with players and the community at large in a more active and meaningful way. But I’m sure that instead of actually being responsive or addressing issues….you’ll just infract my account or delete this thread.

Having developers checking the forums regularly would probably help resolve some issues quicker as they would know what questions to ask, or respond to questions about what we could provide that would help them resolve the issue.

From what I can gather at the moment, any information that developers get is vetted by moderators and if a moderator mis-understands an issue, it could be mis-directed or overlooked, as is what happened when the loot drop issue was first reported in bugs (and was moved to discussion).

Actually, we do not vet any info, we forward them to the appropriate teams, so that they can have a look and then decide what happens with it.
And as you’ve already seen, a lot of Dev’s actually do roam around the forums and gather information themselves and see what happened in the meantime between our report and your discussion.
But you have to understand, they can’t be so active on the forums to talk with you, as they work on their main and biggest task: the game.

What I would love to see posted:
– The developer’s ideas: your thoughts on the state of play, what is working what isn’t
– Specifics: don’t tease us with “we’re implementing a change of some sort sometime” tell us what you’re lookin to do and approximately when.
– Put patch notes on the launcher so I don’t need to hunt them down. If a change is made that has a large impact on a proffession, try to include a few notes so we know why you guys felt X needed to be buffed/nerfed.

I see some interesting suggestions here, but there is one point I would like to talk about: we never give precisely which changes/modifications will come until we are 100% sure of them. The main reason for that is that most of the time, ideas needs to be polished, modified, and sometimes even deleted before we can obtain the best one.

That being said, it’s still good to get constructive feedbacks on the way the communication is done and I would like to thank you for your contributions here.

As Charles and others have mentioned on this thread, the studio took a break from work during the holidays to be with their families. Game developers have lives outside of work. They have friends, spouses, children, and families, too, and like any other company, people took time off from work for the holidays and we take time off on weekends. We’re people like everyone else—we need downtime from our jobs, too.

Mouse makes a great point about the fact that a game developer’s primary job is to work on the game, not read and post on the forums. When a designer or programmer posts on the forums they are taking time out of their extremely busy day to do so. This means taking time from working on the game to post. It is much faster for them to read the feedback on the forums, and take that feedback on board when they work, than to post responses (which may need review by leads). Just because developers are not posting doesn’t mean that they aren’t reading. Our developers read the forums very closely.

With regard to future updates, Colin has already posted in this thread about what you can expect in January. When we have details to provide, we will provide those details. We are not with holding information from you out of spite. We post information when it’s ready to be posted, and not before.